Separating devices have been used in a number of machine mechanisms. A button machine was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 297,496 wherein the blanks for the buttons were provided in a chute and to use the lowermost blank in the machine operation, a lever was depressed which moved the remaining button blanks in the chute upwardly away from the lowermost blank.
In U.S. Pat. No. 1,604,220 a nailing device was disclosed wherein a separator wedge is transversely driven between the lowermost nail and those above such nail.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,888,520 discloses a rocking nail gate which allows several nails through the gate at one time and primarily acts as a safety stop to prevent overloading of nails.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,991,892 discloses a device for feeding bars to a machine tool and discloses a structure which is somewhat more common in the industry. In this structure, two camactuated, pivoted arms act alternately to hold and release the lowermost one of serially loaded bars in a chute.
All of these mechanisms have a principal difficulty of being of use for objects all of one size and tolerate only very small part diameter variations. Whenever the machine is to be changed to operate on a different diameter part, then considerable time is required for various machine adjustments to accommodate this new diameter of parts. This increases the down-time of the machine in its set-up for operation on a new size of part, and therefore tends to make uneconomic the frequent changeover to a different part size.
When the object separator is used with bar loading devices for a machine tool, such bars are often heavy, e.g., as much as 500 pounds in weight and up to several inches in diameter. In order to change the size of bar used with the machine tool, several adjustments are required. Several sets of parts have to be stored, removed from storage, and used to replace existing parts on the machine tool and the removed parts then must be moved to storage. Thus, considerable time is used for accomplishing this change of parts to accommodate a new bar diameter and, in addition, the machine set-up time is all downtime, with no parts capable of being produced while these part replacements and necessary adjustments are being made.
The problem to be solved, therefore, is how to construct a mechanism which will automatically separate serially moving objects, regardless of the size of such objects, and which will accommodate a considerable range of object dimensions.